Make Money Everyday - A Guide to Short-Term Trading

I thought my silence might get a chart out of you

Well I'll prepare to show my newbieness and get this wrong..
But I see price failed to reach 1.36625 multiple times, yet even with the news bullishness last night we still have LHs. 3800 looks like a big number.
What am I missing?

.. And with the weather we're approaching summer here 27.5C today, looks like we're gonna have a few 40C days this year.. Can't say I'm excited about that. The humidity here gets ridiculous!

I was doing some forexfactory browsing and came across this fella - http://www.forexfactory.com/fx-petra

This on his profile caught my attention -
'1. DO NOT SCALP. Stop, just say no, go cold turkey... however you would like to phrase it. I do not believe that the forex market can be scalped profitibly over the long term. We can argue that later. As a fairly new or not-yet-consistently profitable trader, please forget scalping. I am not going to get into a long winded agruement as to why, it would be fruitless. If you don't want to take my advice, fine. I'm not charging anything for it. If you are frustrated and looking for answers, your first step is to STOP SCALPING. If you think you can do this.... read on. If your gambling nature does not allow you to stop, one day your bank account balance will bring you to your senses. '

Then noticed he had this thread - http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=191230

In there he outlines that it is a mathematical impossibility to be consistently successful in forex long term. He believes that every trade you place brings you closer to blowing your account, so you have to place as few trades as possible.
On top of that he also believes the small time frames are 'random'..


I thought I'd share this as what this bloke claims to be a mathematical certainty completely goes against what we do here in this thread.

Do I believe him? No, but I find his conclusions interesting. I think his approach is flawed and he does not factor in the trader who is ultimately the real edge. Yet if you read his thread there's no telling him that

Thanks for sharing that. I just stick with the old adage, opinions are like ass holes...everyone has one.

Mongolian

Yep totally.
I like to try and remain open to any new information, so I'm always sure I'm not operating with blinders on.

If the small time frames are indeed random, they sure seem to be randomly doing the same things over and over again

34C here today.. Summer is gonna be brutal!
Sorry for no conversion mate

Come on - you know that we Americans are dumb and lazy... you can't just throw that out there without some help. We're just going to sit there and look at that number and go WTF is that?? (88 degrees F kids). Yup - you're right. Effing hot!

Haha hey you said it not me

About to attempt exercise in this heat, hopefully I survive so I can trade tonight

3900 what do we reckon? Get through it this time?

Well we got through 3900 and then rubber-banded back to where we were.

Here's my London Open, leaving the charts an hour early because price was just flopping about and I have a little bit of a heat stroke going on
Could have avoided last stop, broke rules, naughty boy.
Still at double what I need a night for my monthly targets.

Also have been speaking to Mike (katrooo) remember him? He's a good bloke.
He's got an interview for Barclays this Wednesday to trade on their spot fx desk. Let's send him some good make money everyday vibes for that

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11957

Pretty good interview. He says it all in the first two minutes.

more good info: http://www.nobrainertrades.com/2011/...-people-d.html

this article is complimentary to the method proposed in this thread.

Awesome will check it out when home, just getting my mop hair cut off.

Interesting read.. definitely seems like it could be useful incorporated with what we already do.

Not sure I agree with this though - 'You can get in all the screentime that you want, but if you’re not observing price in relation to events that have yet to occur or have just occurred, then you mine as well be watching TV.'

From my experience with this it doesn't matter where price goes or why, there are still plenty of opportunities to make money.
I have ransqwuak on when I trade and from the little I know it's interesting to see how price reacts to rumours and news but ultimately seeing the relation rarely effects my bottom line.
I guess I don't know enough to capitalise from that information, but that being the case certainly doesn't hurt my trading in a big way.

NY was cooking last night, bet you boys are smiling today

I've been missing something trading London Open, something that I knew but kept ignoring. So I'm gonna focus on trading the Frankie and London Open for the next week or two and see if I can't put together a nice plan using the levels at those times.

So I've decided to have a closer look at the PA around Frankie and London Open.
One thing I have noticed at LO that I mentioned to Mong a few nights back, is that price often but not always breaks the Asia range in one direction and then pulls back into the range and heads in the other direction.
Because of that, trading the levels and turning when I normally am sometimes means I get chopped to death at the open.

I am also on a separate chart incorporating part of a method that Islander uses to trade the FO and LO. He waits for a cross of the MA and the angle to be pointing in the direction of the cross, then enters around FO and LO.
It is possible to get chopped to death if you take every cross, even if the angle is pointing in the correct direction. But I think in combination with what I already know about the levels and the PA at FO and LO it could be quite profitable.

So tonight where I would have normally been chopped up, I sat on the sidelines and watched and plotted possible trades.

NOTE - I would have also taken a long at 1.41625 after the rejection from 1.41875.

One last thing.. The MA cross is perhaps not even required as you can see the signals in the tick data anyway, but for now I have the separate chart open as a referral.

Saw this post tonight and thought I would share:

'To find out why and how price moves the way it does, the shortest route is to spend a few years watching charts, read up on the fx market micro-structure literature, have a few mates at dealing desks in the City, and to collate your findings into a coherent framework.

At least that's how I figured a couple of things out. And if you continue down that line you may want to trade on that information, and your mates may be willing to provide it - at a price.

In absence of insider order flow information one may then, as you seem to be hoping to do, try to anticipate from chart patterns what is going on. That is how this thread started, and that is what I used to derive sometimes amazing profits from. Anticipating what would happen during the morning session I could predict most twists and turns.

But there is a fundamental problem with this, and it lies in the word anticipating. While such anticipation may be possible during long stretches of time, it doesn't imply any capability to predict what is going to happen. It just happened that during the successful stretch, that the 'boys' were happening to be repeating old tricks. But what if they change the rule-book, and what if they move on in life and are replaced by a new group of people with new tricks up their sleeves?

The conclusion is that, unless you have secure access to inside information, anticipation is a precarious approach to trading, even if you become an expert at the intraday market patterns.

And if you think about it, how could you or I in the long run anticipate or explain what is going on at dealing banks with multi-billion dollar accounts and ability to move the market at their will - unless we know a few people working in those organisations?

One may recall the words of mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783):

Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.

The conclusion is, of course, that trying to anticipate the markets may be futile, but perhaps we can find a 'fictive hypothesis' that enables us to trade the markets profitably.

And studying the charts I found that many if not most patterns that I used to anticipate could actually be read and traded straight off the charts without anticipation.

So these days I trade by rules that enable me to enter and exit trades without any sense of anticipation. This has two major benefits.

First, I am relieved of personal involvement in the trades. I see a setup and I enter. If it's a win or loss has nothing to do with me or my thought processes - it's simply a matter of what the market happened to be doing now.

Second, I can trade any market at any time. I used feel most comfortable during the European morning - now I trade any market any time.

To put it more briefly, my recommendation would be to let go of all attempts to anticipate the market, and to find a way of trading compatible with that.

This doesn't mean that one shouldn't study and learn as much as possible about the markets. But when that study is done, the findings should be summarised in a trading system that in no way is based on discretionary anticipation of what may happen next.

Follow, don't anticipate.'

Have a great weekend ya'll!

Well... if anyone was caught being long on the yen.... ouch. Nothing like a little gov't intervention to get your attention. Not quite as dramatic as SNB's action a while back, but a nice pop none the less.

Sooo given the boost in volatility by the BOJ...we essentially begin a new month. November is upon us - 2 months left in this year. Let's focus on Mastery as we wind down the year.

One definition of mastery is expert skill or knowledge. I challenge you if you are reading this... are mastering your skill or are you dabbling... are you dedicated to honing your skills and you mental state? Are you mastering your 'edge' so that you know in a moments notice whether or not the setup being presented to you is one that is in your wheelhouse or not? Are you mastering your Money Management, protecting your inventory?

It's pretty easy here people - either you are growing or you are dying. I leave you with a clip from one of my all-time favorite movies...

Mate uncanny, I watched that movie on TV last night when I got home from work, LOVE it

November it is! Bring it on

So I turned up to work an hour early today, luckily that isn't so bad being a trader because you can just surf the interweb or do some study.
Europe's summer time ended today so they're back an hour.

Here are my charts from FO and LO so far. Mainly taking momentum trades using the levels, MA cross and fibs at the moment.
It means I can take trades with the levels that I wasn't comfortable taking before and as I said in my last post avoid getting chopped to death in the swings at FO and LO.

I let a few normal setups from my rules go by tonight, just trying to get comfortable with this first.
If I had taken them I would have been very nicely profitable. It seems this like is a much more intelligent way for me to trade LO than I was previously.
Both approaches combined will help keep me on the right side of the market.

I am looking for 15 pips from each trade, running with a 7.5 pip SL.
You can see by the chart that I could have held the last one a bit longer and taken a lot more. Perhaps I will adapt at some point and look at holding.
But for now all I need is 15 pips a night and I hit my monthly targets. So anything over that and I am a happy man

EDIT - Of course if there is only room for 12 or less that is what I will take.